A novel by a masterful Russian writer that dares us to love a killer
On Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator
Writing a review of fiction is a difficult task. Compared with nonfiction, fiction resists attempts to pin it down; the more you examine it, the more it transforms before your eyes. I thought The Aviator, which I read recently after holding the author’s beautiful novel Laurus in loving memory for years, provided an excellent chance to explore the book review form. Now on the other side, I’ve learned that the deep engagement necessary to review literary art unlocks deeper recesses of meaning. It was only through working on this review that I reached all the insights contained herein.
Spoiler alert: If you plan to read The Aviator, do not read this review! Otherwise, please proceed — though if the review is successful, I will have kindled your interest in the novel. There’s still much to gain from reading it, even knowing (most of) its secrets.
Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel, The Aviator, set in 20th-century Russia and translated in 2016 from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, is a sensitive exploration of the mechanism of memory and the proper focus of history.
One of its satellite characters, Zaretsky, is a world-class ogre. At the end of each shift at the sausage factory, he smuggles out a sausage, stuffed in his underpants, and eats it alone in his room for dinner. He shares an apartment with our protagonist, Innokenty, and Innokenty’s mother, along with a young woman, Anastasia, and her father, Professor Voronin. This group was arbitrarily assigned to live in a single apartment unit under Soviet “densification.” “If they feel it,” Zaretsky tells Innokenty about the sausage, “I’ll tell them it’s my peepee.”
Zaretsky emits a foul odor due to bad hygiene. He has no friends. Next to the kindly professor, Zaretsky is especially loathsome. One evening, GPU men come to search the apartment – assisted by Zaretsky, who has denounced the professor for counterrevolutionary activities. He shows them which cabinets hold the professor’s things, yielding a colander, a grater, and several empty jars. Young Innokenty is in love with Anastasia, and as the professor is taken away, he whispers to Innokenty: “You are responsible for her now.” After her father left — it was the last time she ever saw him — Anastasia’s words “came out of her with sobs, one after another, like waves of vomiting.” Later, while drunk, Zaretsky admits to Innokenty that “I myself don’t know why I denounced the professor.”
The remaining flatmates nonetheless settle into a rhythm of tacit respect. “It is difficult to live in constant hatred,” Innokenty reflects, “even if it is justified.” Then Zaretsky is found dead on his route home from the factory; he had been struck on the back of the head with a heavy object. Innokenty is asked to identify him at the morgue. A few nights later, an encore: GPU men search the apartment again, this time for evidence that incriminates Innokenty. Despite finding nothing, he is arrested for murder, and his interrogator beats him until he breaks. He admits his role in a counterrevolutionary plot led by the professor and confesses to killing Zaretsky.
Innokenty describes these scenes in a notebook. That notebook is the novel we read. In its opening lines, a memory: “I used to tell her: wear a hat when it’s cold, otherwise you’ll get frostbite on your ears.” The account continues: “That little picture surfaced in my memory just now, though I haven’t the faintest idea whom it concerns.”
Nor does he know, at first, where he is, what’s happened to him, or even who he is. He’s lying in a bed as someone wearing a white lab coat approaches — “Geiger. Your doctor,” the clinician introduces himself; “And you’re Innokenty Petrovich Platonov, isn’t that so?” “I could not confirm that,” Innokenty writes – not yet.
At this point, Innokenty can remember nothing about himself, and Geiger prescribes the notebook as a memory aid. “Try recalling as much as you can, your effort is important here,” Geiger says; “We need you to remember everything yourself.”
What memory is, and how it functions, sits on the novel’s surface. The first glimmers that return to Innokenty are sensory fragments: smells, sounds, images. They are the scent of “wheaten hair,” the “aroma of printer’s ink” — contiguous with the synesthetic “aroma of wandering” through the tale of Robinson Crusoe. When our narrator flips through a copy of that book, the sensations that once accompanied it return: “my grandmother’s cough”; “the smoke of my father’s cigarette.” And he remembers something else: the feeling of lightness that a specific name invokes. Anastasia.
Geiger’s theory of memory frames the novel’s: our consciousness pushes the very worst experiences “into the far corners of memory,” and so joy is the first to return. We become acquainted with Innokenty in the same ennobling way he becomes reacquainted with himself: chiefly, through memories of a joyous childhood, especially before his father’s untimely death, and of his love-struck adolescent encounters with Anastasia.
This honeymoon period doesn’t last. Scenes of a different character begin to push through memory’s retaining wall. “One time or other, I had to drag a frozen person to the trench containing the corpses,” Innokenty writes. “I dragged and was a bit envious of him: this life no longer concerned him but it still concerned me.”
Geiger breaks protocol to reveal the most significant event in Innokenty’s life and the reason for his amnesia. After his conviction for Zaretsky’s murder, Innokenty had been sent to the Solovki work camp on an island in the White Sea in 1923. In that frigid place, at the Laboratory for Absolute Zero and Regeneration, Soviet scientists ran cryogenic experiments on camp prisoners. Only one frozen prisoner had been successfully thawed, according to Geiger: Innokenty. This is why Innokenty sees a ballpoint pen and wonders at its “metal lead”; why, after Innokenty figures out that he was born in 1900 (“the same age as the century”), he sees an astounding expiration date on his pill bottle – 1999, the year in which he has been resurrected; why, confronting his reflection in the mirror, he thinks: “In 1999, someone the same age as the century should have a completely different appearance.”
Vodolazkin adapts real history to make this setup at least plausible. The USSR was a leader in cryobiology after World War II, and Soviet scientists were pioneers in preserving human tissue at very low temperatures. They also had a longstanding fascination with defeating death. According to the Russian philosophical movement known as Cosmism, humanity’s moral duty was to resurrect everyone who had ever lived using future science. Vodolazkin’s invention is simply to move up the scientific interest in cryobiology by a few decades and merge it with the USSR’s history of using political prisoners as guinea pigs.
***
Innokenty’s resurrection lets Vodolazkin explore what such a thing might feel like – you wake up in a city that used to be intimately familiar to you, but it’s eight decades later and the city’s old bones wear a new skin. Like in Robinson Crusoe, Innokenty is shipwrecked on an island – twice: first on Solovki, a literal island, and second a figurative one, where he is the only remaining testifier to a bygone age. “A person is placed in a certain historical time for some reason,” Innokenty muses. “What happens when someone loses that?” Even his speech is dislocated. He speaks with “a light accent, one that’s not contemporary.” He is not “of” the time he finds himself in, and there is no one else on earth who can relate.
All this gives Innokenty a singular vantage point for considering Soviet atrocities, and the media – upon hearing that he was revived — is hungry to hear his pronouncements. But unluckily for them, the person least amenable to a conventional view of history is the one who has come back. For Innokenty, great historical events don’t happen to the populace, like a stroke of bad luck. Instead, they “grow in each separate individual.” Atrocity surges up from a people’s roots. “I do remember it well,” Innokenty says of the October Revolution that brought Bolsheviks to power. “How was this ‘handful of conspirators’ able to topple a thousand-year empire? It means Bolshevism is not something external for us.”
Innokenty refuses to separate evildoers at the top from a victim-class at the bottom. It is an equalizing view. There were “enough” regular people whose individual will merged “to turn the country into hell.” “My cousin succumbs to the oprichniks, my neighbor goes to snitch on Professor Voronin,” Innokenty reflects; “Voronin’s colleague Averyanov gives monstrous testimony about him. Why?!”
If Stalin was no less than what the Russian people wanted in a leader, as Innokenty tells it, then it follows that nearly an entire populace was culpable. People are perpetrators and victims at once. Zaretsky denounced his neighbor, and then he was murdered. Wholesale condemnation would ensnare virtually everyone, eventually.
The novel’s purpose is not to seek justice for the Soviet regime’s crimes. The path of justice is the path that never finds a way out, circling back on itself endlessly. “What can be higher than justice?” exclaims Nastya, a woman Innokenty meets in the novel’s post-resurrection present, and whom he marries. Innokenty thinks for a moment. He answers her: “Probably only charity.” Later, he corrects himself: “I once told Nastya that mercy is higher than justice. Just now I thought: not mercy but love. Love is higher than justice.”
Love as a replacement for justice requires that love be an act, a practice, and not simply a feeling. Where do you start? Just as the seeds of Bolshevism and terror began with individuals in Innokenty’s reckoning, so too does love. Again, our protagonist offers an unusual theory: “when you describe a person in a genuine way,” Innokenty writes, “you cannot help but love him.”
A curious condition of Innokenty after the thaw is that he can no longer draw. He had been an art student, but although his head remembered this fact, his hand could not. Then, of a sudden, his faculty returns. How he chooses to celebrate its return is utterly surprising to us, the readers, and Innokenty’s friends alike. His first drawing subject is not Anastasia, not his mother, not Nastya. “I would draw Zaretsky,” he writes. “Portrait of a person mournfully bent over sausage. I would draw him compassionately rather than mockingly. If not with love then at least with pity.”
Genuinely describing a person — in words or in pencil lines — makes you love them, Innokenty believes. Does it work from the outside? Does encountering a genuine description of a person also make you love them?
Geiger finds himself “stunned” by Innokenty’s portrait. “It liberates Zaretsky,” he says; “It delivers him from his horrendous role as a maggot.”
Nastya, who has her own reasons for loathing Zaretsky, reflects with wonder that “only yesterday I hated Zaretsky because of my grandmother’s stories. But I’ve forgiven him after that portrait.” She amends: “Almost forgiven.” It’s not an unbiased experiment, she adds, because she’s the portrait artist’s wife. “What wife’s husband isn’t a genius in her eyes?” Perhaps it is only through the merciful description of someone she already loves that she forgives Zaretsky — well, “almost.”
***
The aims of Innokenty’s notebook, which had begun on doctor’s orders, transform midway through the novel. Nastya becomes pregnant with a girl, their daughter, and they immediately name their future daughter Anna. Innokenty wants Anna to know everything about him, to fill in every gap in his life’s chronicle, to describe “the sound of rain, the nocturnal rustling of leaves, and a million other things — all that unites us.”
The project is so large that he can’t do it alone. Innokenty enlists the help of Geiger and Nastya in filling out the “descriptions” of his life. Here is Geiger, as he takes up the chronicle’s pen at Innokenty’s urging:
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can someone be helped in describing his own life?’ [...]
‘Treat it,’ he said, ‘as a life story.’
‘Yours?’
‘Mine. And a life story in general.’
How is a life story — in general — possibly to be told? The answer lies in the novel’s own metafictional form. This, Vodolazkin is perhaps saying, is how you tell a life story in general. What we are reading is a manuscript within the novel’s imagined world — Innokenty’s notebook, and later, the writings of Geiger and Nastya interspliced within it, so that eventually all three voices merge with scattered clues as to which one is writing.
This innovation pushes us to recall a scene early on, as Geiger tries to reassure Innokenty about his fragmented memory. “It would be boring if recollections reflected life like a mirror,” Geiger says. “They only do that selectively, which brings them closer to art.” The Aviator is the selective recollection of a single life, and its argument is that the artistic depiction of a single life teaches us something about life in general.
But the novel also argues with itself. One of the scenes Innokenty asks Geiger to write for the chronicle is Zaretsky’s death. When Innokenty reads Geiger’s account, he is forced to conclude: “it did not suffice.”
Geiger’s failure reveals the mistake in Innokenty’s premise. Not everything can be described by everyone. The background strokes may be widely accessible — what the hills look like, how it feels to breathe the misty air, the particular sonority of an arriving train. But the foreground is not known to all. Only the people who participated in Zaretsky’s death — Zaretsky, and whoever killed him — can describe that scene.
So, the killer describes it. And this is how we learn that the GPU didn’t arrest the wrong person. Innokenty killed Zaretsky, and true to Geiger’s theory that the worst memories are farthest from the mind’s reach, this recollection is the last to return.
With it, the full scope of the novel’s experiment snaps into place. All this time, writing Innokenty’s notebook, Vodolazkin has been describing a person in a genuine way. Can we help but love him, even after learning he is a murderer?
This closed circle is wonderfully wrought. The belated realization that everything has been leading up to this point marks one of those incomparable moments in a reading life. It is the kind of pleasure that only the particular immersion of literature can deliver, as we realize the picture we have collaborated with the author in constructing inside our minds was turned inside out. I have no bone to pick with the craft of the reveal: the structure, the foreshadowing, the matter-of-fact mode of delivery.
Yet for all those masterful strokes, there’s an inherent flaw. In Innokenty, Vodolazkin has given us a character who is truly lovable. Reflecting on his portrayal, it strikes me that the best way to get a reader to love a character is to show that character in the act of loving. Innokenty’s recollections of his early years — of his mother, father, grandparents, and then of his remembered love for Anastasia — reveal his loving attention, and we can’t help loving him for it. And if Vodolazkin had tried the same experiment on a less sympathetic character — Zaretsky? Zaretsky never had visitors to the apartment. He courted no romance. He didn’t try to befriend his flatmates, even though Innokenty sensed a certain loneliness. We don’t see Zaretsky love anyone and so there’s nothing to kindle our own love. But then again, maybe this is Vodolazkin’s point, too. After all, Innokenty qualified his ambition for drawing Zaretsky: “If not with love then at least with pity.”
Yet Zaretsky had a mother, and one day Innokenty and Anastasia had encountered him visiting her grave at the cemetery. Zaretsky carried a “pink paper flower.” Maybe that single love story — Zaretsky’s for his mother — would have been enough to enkindle our love for him, if it were only described genuinely. This is the extreme test of the novel’s theory, and it isn’t ventured. Or better to say, it’s ventured halfway: through Innokenty’s pencil portrait of a “mourning” Zaretsky, sitting alone, his sausage and vodka serving as “his own witnesses.” It’s not a complete success (“almost,” qualifies Nastya), and maybe that’s because Innokenty cannot deliver a genuine depiction, knowing only part of Zaretsky’s story.
When the realization of his crime at last dawns, Innokenty’s perspective shifts from Zaretsky back to himself. “Everything looks more complex with respect to who bashed him,” Innokenty realizes. “Is he a villain or an instrument of justice? Or both? How can all that be explained to Anna?”
At first, Innokenty’s recovery looked to be a medical marvel. But something happens. His brain cells start dying, and doctors can’t figure out the mechanism. Time is running out. His notebook could be Anna’s best opportunity to understand — and love — a father she never gets to meet. So, this chronicle is not a straight history. It is a means to an end — his daughter’s love. Yet perhaps that’s a quality shared by all histories. Like Innokenty’s chronicle of his life, no history is impartial.
After I finished my first read-through, I flipped back to the beginning of this book that is the fictional Innokenty’s account of his life, painstakingly drawn for his unborn daughter. The book’s real-life author, Vodolazkin, has a daughter, too.
I read, with racing heart, the book’s dedication:
“To my daughter.”
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Stay curious,
Laura